Digital garden
This is my digital garden, a place for my ideas to grow and be harvested. You might find the following resources useful:
The basics
- The seen and the unseen Dissoi Logoi is a rhetorical exercise of unknown authorship, most likely dating to just after the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) based on comments within the exercise’s text. It starts on page 2 in the attached PDF.
- The market is a process not a product. “Order Defined in the Process of its Emergence” James Buchanan
The limits of knowledge in machine learning
- “A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning” by Pedro Domingos (2012) alternate version
- “Data mining fool’s gold” by Gary Smith
Discounting and time
- “[Sustainability: An Economist’s Perspective](https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/texts/425/Solow (1991), Sustainability.pdf)” by Robort Solow
- “On hyperbolic discounting and uncertain hazard rates”
- “Searching for Safety”
Information and firms
- “Designing organizations for an information-rich world” by Herbert Simon (1971)
Power laws
Some basics of tech
Economics of AI
- The New Business of AI (and How It’s Different From Traditional Software) by Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein
- “Taming the Tail: Adventures in Improving AI Economics” by Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein
Robots and workers
- “Are Workers Losing to Robots?” By Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu
- “Measuring the Gig Economy: Current Knowledge and Open Issues” by Katharine G. Abraham, John C. Haltiwanger, Kristin Sandusky & James R. Spletzer
Zero priced goods
- “The Specialness of Zero” by Joshua Gans (2020)
- “[The Economics of Information](https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/privacy %26 data/stigler – economics of information.pdf?w=d9e957b9)” (1961) by George J. Stigler
Platform economics
- “The Economics of Two-Sided Markets” Marc Rysman (2009)
- “Controllability of complex networks” by Yang-Yu Liu, Jean-Jacques Slotine & Albert-László Barabási (2011)
Space
Project Horizon was a 1959 study to determine the feasibility of constructing a scientific / military base on the Moon, at a time when the U.S. Department of the Army, Department of the Navy, and Department of the Air Force had total responsibility for U.S. space program plans. Horizon never progressed past the feasibility stage, being rejected by President Dwight Eisenhower when primary responsibility for America’s space program was transferred to the civilian agency NASA.
Three space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made. These have been scanned and are available here as small, medium, large, and publication quality jpeg images.
Defense
In 1962 the United States conducted its final atmospheric nuclear test series, Operation Dominic. The absolute final bomb was Ripple II, test 2. This article pulls everything we know about the test, which still remains classified. There is a lot of evidence that it was a pure fusion device, which has only been theorized.
A Review of Criticality Accidents
Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving US Nuclear Weapons 1950-1989
Space-based ballistic missile defense: a multidimensional analysis (1985) | Hacker News
On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office, GAO/IMTEC-92-26, entitled Patriot Missile Defense: Software Problem Led to System Failure at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia reported on the cause of the failure. It turns out that the cause was an inaccurate calculation of the time since boot due to computer arithmetic errors. Specifically, the time in tenths of second as measured by the system’s internal clock was multiplied by 1/10 to produce the time in seconds.
[The Fishback ramjet revisited](* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521005804)
https://lilium.com/newsroom-detail/technology-behind-the-lilium-jet
DARPA’s investment strategy follows a portfolio approach. Reaching for outsized impact means taking on risk, and high risk in pursuit of high payoff is a hallmark of DARPA’s programs. They are listed here. Past DARPA research programs can be viewed in the Past Programs Archive.
Public policy is about making fewer bad choices
Public policy and wicked problems
- “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning” by Horst W. J. Rittel & Melvin M. Webber
The public policy process demystified
- “Congress is a ‘They,’ not an ‘It’: Legislative intent as oxymoron” by Kenneth A. Shepsle
Selected tech policy topics
DARPA
- “The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency”
- “Why does DARPA work?” by Ben Reinhardt
NASA and space
The economics of privacy
- “The Economics of Privacy” (1981) by Richard A. Posner
- “Privacy Regulation and Online Advertising” by Avi Goldfarb and Catherine E. Tucker
- “Privacy Regulation and Market Structure” (2011) by James Campbell, Avi Goldfarb, and Catherine Tucker
Freedom of speech
- “[Freedom of Speech, Information Privacy, and the Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People from Speaking About You](https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_comments/face-facts-forum-facial-recognition-technology-project-no.p115406-00084 /00084-82626.pdf)” (1999) by Eugene Volokh
My other work
- I wrote a guide to tech and innovation issues for policymakers, which needs updating.
- I’m constantly updating bibliographies on
- I have strong confidence about these political, philosophic, and economic statements.
So far this year, I’ve been thinking about excessive veto power, the value of time and discounting, technological atonement, when an online community migrates, the Millennial wealth gap, short-termism, the rural broadband penalty, COVID-19 and the relocalization of politics, the Spence distortion, and that Noam Chomsky signed the Harper’s Magazine letter.